Ghillie suit is a type of camouflage clothing designed to resemble the background environment (moss, leaves, twigs etc.), typically used by snipers or wildlife photographers. In English, its name is derived from Ghillie Dhu, a mythical being from Scottish folklore that dwells in the forest and wears a coat made of moss and leaves.

In Czech, we call ghillie suit “hejkal”, refering to a mythical forest being from our folklore instead. I wondered whether some other countries use their own mythical beings to describe the suit as well.

13 comments
  1. In Polish we say “bojówki”, literally “combats” (“bój” is a somewhat outdated word for “combat”).

  2. Ghilliedräkt I found after googling which is a direct translation of ghillie suit

    Edit: and if you didn’t know that name like me, you would probably call it a kamouflagedräkt which you can probably guess means “camouflage suit”

  3. In Dutch we rarely take the effort to translate loan words from English, so we just call it a Ghillie suit

  4. Here the suit is refferred more often as just “ghillie” or “tuta ghillie” (tuta is suit in Italian) or “ghillie suit”. Much less is translated as “tuta mimetica” (camouflage suit)

  5. Also called it Ghillie Suit when we made ours in the Bundeswehr.

    Sometime they were also called Scharfschützenanzug or Tarnanzug, mostly in older literature.

  6. I think it’s called “une tenue ghillie”, which litteraly can be translated to “a ghillie outfit”

  7. I’ve always heard it called “ropa de camuflaje” (camouflage clothes) or sometimes shortened to “camo”.

    I don’t know if perhaps in more specialised sectors they use a more specific name to this kind of clothes.

  8. I’m not familiar with this word in either English or Irish. But Ghillie Dhu would be Giolla Dubh in Irish. That’s probably just the name of the creature, not the clothing.

  9. Camouflagepak (camouflage suit) for Flanders. Don’t know about Wallonia/Brussels but I imagine they follow the French example.

    Ghillie is only used by guys who played too much CoD.

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